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Vantage Point
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: February 25, 2008

The same event is played out repeatedly from several different perspectives in the new film Vantage Point. If that narrative technique sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a classic. You’ll find it in several of William Faulkner’s great novels, for instance, but it has since become known as the ‘Rashomon’ device, because it was made famous by the film of that name. The Rashomon device has been used, at times, to communicate something about the elusive nature of truth, or the complexity of the collective human experience. But in the case of Vantage Point, we’re not so lucky. The gimmick is used only to sell tickets, and to conceal, for a while, that the film is literally without a story. To call Vantage Point a one-trick-pony would be an insult to ponies.

The movie begins, poetically enough, in a TV production trailer where Sigourney Weaver pieces together coverage of an international anti-terrorism summit from six different cameras. At that point there’s a terrorist attack, and this is the event we’re required to watch and re-watch from various perspectives. I should point out before I continue that Vantage Point actually drops its Rashomon gimmick about halfway through, once the gunfights, car chases, and explosions get too far flung to stuff into any one character’s experience. So much for dancing with the girl that brung ya.

Anyway, for a while, at least, we watch the day unfold from several points of view. There’s a burned out secret service agent played by a perpetually grimacing Dennis Quaid. (Quaid seems to be morphing into Harrison Ford with every new film.) There’s a stressed out Spanish police officer whose significance to the plot is never made clear. There’s the President of the United States, or, as he’s referred to 500 times before the closing credits, “POTUS.” And there’s an American tourist with a video camera, who turns out to be a kind of action-Zapruder. The tourist is played by Forrest Whitaker, and it’s fitting that this performance should hit screens on Oscar weekend. It seems that nothing, no escalating chronicle of Oscar hangovers, no bewildering list of past winners, will ever diminish the prestige of the Academy Awards. But perhaps Hollywood should at least consider the option of revoking its top honor, just like the NCAA can revoke the Heisman Trophy and the Olympics can take back the gold medal. Maybe that possibility would have kept Forrest Whitaker from serving up a bunch of weird behavior and laughable melodrama and calling it acting. His performance in Vantage Point is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s David Caruso bad.

Speaking of CSI Miami, this film is from that increasingly popular school of filmmaking that deeply fears the human attention span. Thus, cameras are in constant motion, and flashes of light and “whoosh” noises accompany each edit. What’s more, to pile on the nausea and maybe boost the audience seizure quotient, the filmmakers rewind each episode in superfast motion before moving on to the next. It all amounts to a bunch of noise and blurry movement where a film should be. Maybe this’ll play better on someone’s iphone someday, but it seems to me the filmmakers, in piecing together their silly little project, overlooked the most important vantage point of all… that of their audience. Ah, but that’s just one man’s perspective. Somewhere out there, at some cosmic intersection of collective human consciousness, the truth lies. And out there, Vantage Point is probably worse than I thought it was.

Copyright © 2008 Theo Michelfeld